MUSIC; Singing the Lament of a Fugitive Slave

By MATTHEW GUREWITSCH

Published: September 2, 2007

IN the fall of 2002 the composer Richard Danielpour was in residence at the American Academy in Berlin, orchestrating the first act of his first opera, ''Margaret Garner'' but still awaiting the words for the final scenes. For weeks, in calls to Princeton, N.J., he had been hounding his librettist, the Nobel Prize-winning novelist Toni Morrison, who would answer quietly: ''Good things take time. You have to wait.''

Finally, in late October, the fax machine began disgorging pages. Mr. Danielpour scooped them up, drove to the palatial Hotel Adlon Kempinski, ordered lunch, began reading and soon found himself in tears. As he told the story the other day in Manhattan, where ''Margaret Garner'' was in rehearsal for its local premiere, at the New York City Opera on Sept. 11, a waiter noticed that Mr. Danielpour had stopped eating. ''Excuse me, sir,'' the waiter said, ''is anything wrong with your risotto?''

In her time Margaret Garner was a cause c?bre. In 1867, within a decade of her death, the painter Thomas Satterwhite Noble called her ''the modern Medea.'' The analogy is at best approximate. The barbarian princess of mythology, abandoned by her Greek husband, kills her children for revenge. Garner, a runaway slave from Kentucky, cut a daughter's throat rather than see her sent back into slavery. Had a posse of slave hunters in Ohio not prevented her, she probably would have killed her other children and herself as well.

Hers was reportedly the longest fugitive-slave trial of the mid-19th century. It hinged on whether she should be judged as a human being, capable of knowing right from wrong, or treated as property, a thing. In the opera the court must rule whether her crime is murder or theft, in the sense of destruction of property.

Garner's story, liberally embroidered with magical realism, lies behind Ms. Morrison's much-praised ghost novel, ''Beloved,'' in which the dead can be as physical a presence as the living. But for Ms. Morrison the thematic heart of the opera is the legal debate. The libretto sticks much closer to the historical record than did her novel. Still, she takes liberties. The real Garner, for instance, died by drowning; in the opera an inexorable dramatic logic carries her to the gallows.

Ms. Morrison does not spare her heroine retribution, but she also gives her a lyrical epiphany, much in the spirit of ''Aida'' or ''Tristan und Isolde.'' When Mr. Danielpour had finished reading those scenes, he called Ms. Morrison to say, ''It's exactly right -- beyond what I've hoped for.'' Ms. Morrison replied, ''It was the hardest work I've ever done.''

Mr. Danielpour, though 51, is not the late convert to opera he may seem. ''For years I felt I was a theater composer in disguise,'' he said. ''I couldn't write an instrumental work without having a secret personal dramatic scena attached.''

His association with Ms. Morrison, 76, goes back to 1993, when they collaborated on the song cycle ''Sweet Talk'' for Jessye Norman. Setting the texts, Mr. Danielpour said, was ''effortless.'' So when Ms. Morrison suggested lunch to discuss another idea, he agreed at once. Both, it turned out, had Margaret Garner on their minds.

In an e-mail message from Princeton, Ms. Morrison picked up the story: ''After months and months of talk, I received a kind of enhanced 'treatment' via Danielpour. In reading it, I found it 'wrong' in enough places -- i.e., 'off,' misleading -- to want to correct it. I began to rewrite, then write the libretto.''

The work would be nothing like her books. Oprah Winfrey, a friend of Ms. Morrison, once complained on camera that the novels were tough going, requiring readers to keep flipping back to work out passages that had eluded them the first time. ''I took that to mean she felt forced to understand every word, its obvious and nuanced meanings, context etc.,'' Ms. Morrison wrote. ''So I said, 'That's called reading.' ''

In opera such density would hardly do. Mr. Danielpour was looking for language ''halfway between prose and poetry,'' he said, ''a skeleton on which music can form itself.'' Ms. Morrison, for her part, was obsessed with finding language that would be ''lyrical, fully felt and imagined,'' she said. At the same time, she added, the task liberated her from having to provide ''the 'music' -- color, sound and rhythm'' she builds into her novels.

''I could create language,'' she said, ''and the composer would provide all the rest.''

For the score Mr. Danielpour was aiming for a natural, truly American hybrid of European opera and American musical theater, imbued with the rhythm and blues, gospel and spirituals he grew up with. ''This wasn't just music I listened to or liked,'' he said. ''It's what I loved. Growing up in Florida in the '60s, a displaced white Jewish boy, a first-generation American whose parents were born in Iran, hearing all these things through the filter of the racist South.''

He wanted the singing to feel close to colloquial American traditions, he continued, with ''less vibrato, more straight tone.'' The vocal lines are littered with grace notes, Mr. Danielpour's way of indicating that the main notes should be approached from below, as in gospel singing.

''The notation is imperfect,'' he said. ''But I don't want Margaret to sound like the last thing she sang was 'Tosca.' It has to sound like she's spent her life singing at a Baptist church.''